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Comment by chrsstrm | Hacker News Reader

If I had a nickel for every time I've been pitched an app/system like that over the past couple years, well, then I'd have plenty of money to pay for news subscriptions. It's a good concept, it just needs a champion big enough to build a standard process that is elegant and painless and then onboard the largest news sources to kick-start the ecosystem. The hardest parts will be money transmission and getting everyone to agree to your standards and processes (in a way that gets them paid and doesn't steer potential paying eyes off to a competitor because you want to build a platform or marketplace instead of an add-on payment tool). Of course with all the new things happening in fintech, this type of system is not that hard to build today.

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Technology is a non-issue IMO. People don't want micropayments for the most part. Some people tolerated "midi-payments" for songs and mobile apps to some degree but even that has mostly migrated to subscriptions and "free to play" apps with in-app purchases.

People don't want micropayments because even now in 2023 the entire payments industry seems to not be able to design a payment flow that doesn't suck. The UX on almost all payments is just terrible. Being gated behind login flows, awkward input forms, TOU acceptance dialogues, receipt and confirmation screens, and being bounced back and forth between the store and third-party systems is just an overall awful experience. I don't care how much something costs, if it takes me more time to pay for an article than it does to read it, I'm out. I still remember the very first time I used Google Pay on my Android in a physical store as it was such a magical experience. I actually stopped myself twice on the way out of the store to do a double-take at my receipt to confirm I had actually paid - it was that fast and easy. Micropayments need that magic and speed. If the only thing standing between me and an article I'm interested in is a FaceID auth, that's very acceptable. This flow can be done today, it's just that no one is willing to strip the process down to its most basic form. If you can solve that first step then there's only 99 more problems to go.

I think it's actually because people don't like spending money, even very small amounts, for things they have decided fall in the 'free' category. As previous poster said, it's a monkey problem, not a tech problem.

Yet, "free to play" games are ludicrously profitable. Surely a large part of that is addiction, but there also is a tech problem here. If paying for a newspaper article has lots of friction (sign up here, confirm email, credit card, 2 factor confirmation, now you have a subscription instead of just buying; cancelation only by carrier pigeon at midnight), then no way.

That is also why the Google and apple appstores can charge such large fees. Sure, buying on websites and sideloading are possible but much higher friction -> many customers simply won't bother.

Nah, people used to pay buskers with pocket change.

That happens less because they don't carry cash anymore.

It's the same thing here.

If it was easier to do, more people would do it.

Look at Onlyfans. People pay good money for what you can get for free.

Difference is that the examples you gave don't have the expectation of being free. Online news articles do.

I don't think so, the media has been pretty resistant to providing this kind of model. If they allow you to read a single article cheaply it would mean a lot of lost subscriptions and it isn't easy to price individual pieces of content.

It’s really the credit card fees that make it non-viable. That and it’s hard to charge someone $10 to read a $.99 article, and promise them they’ll have $9 in credits they can use in the future. That and network effects.

If I had the option to pay $1 each time NYT or other sources pay-walled me out, they’d have a lot of my money.

I'm pretty sure you're in the small minority. If people were clamoring for micropayments, there's a large fintech/startup world that would find a way to make it work. (And Apple sold/sells $0.99 apps.)

Probably 4-7 dollars before you read something not worth the dollar and give up.

Would you be willing to pay for all content? Reading the first few 2 pages here would cost 60 dollars. Should you be paying to read everyone's comments?

I topped up a multi site system back in 2018 with £3, something like 10p an article. PayPal I think, but fine sat online payment cost 10% fir that or 30p, still worth it for the publisher.

Alas not enough readers used the system and it shut down. People don’t want to pay.

The web site can provide user with a credit up to $10 or $25, then charge him.

> It's a good concept, it just needs a champion big enough to build a standard process that is elegant and painless and then onboard the largest news sources to kick-start the ecosystem.

Like some sort of HTTP 402 response? https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2616#section-10.4.3

I still say the web would be better than it is now, if microtransactions had been built into protocols ASAP.

Free begat ads begat tracking begat walled gardens begat centralization begat destruction of a diversity of market players

Micro-transactions wouldn’t eliminate ads. How many years did people buy ad filled newspapers or magazines? How about paying for cable tv that channels show ads on in between tv show segments that also do in content ad placement? You’re just describing another source of revenue for websites, not the only one.

Paid users are better target for ads, so they cost more. Users are paying to self-select them for the costly, highly targeted ads, increasing income and reducing expenses. Win-Win

> I still say the web would be better than it is now, if microtransactions had been built into protocols ASAP.

No, for dog’s sake! Microtransactions are a cancer and come with perverse incentives leading to enshitification of everything they touch. They would not solve any issue with clickbait or sensationalism. Plus, I am not going to count pennies when I read news online or manage yet another pseudo-currency.

Some kind of all-you-can-read aggregated subscription is much, much better: more reader-friendly, it comes with incentives to keep readers happy on the long term, and media don’t need to rely only on hit pieces. In fact, Apple News would be close to perfect if it weren’t siloed into its app. I’d sign up with a decent competitor in a heart beat.

An all you can read aggregated source is pretty much micropayments with an extra step involved.

It's not a business model media companies are typically too eager to be involved with in either case.

> An all you can read aggregated source is pretty much micropayments with an extra step involved.

From the user’s perspective, it is one less step involved. We just have to pay x every months and not think about it. We don’t have to babysit yet another number going up or down on yet another account.

> It's not a business model media companies are typically too eager to be involved with in either case.

Yeah, and I imagine the value proposition is not great, from what we’ve seen in music streaming services. Still, for me it would be better than either paywalls or microtransactions.

> From the user’s perspective, it is one less step involved.

I was replying more to your point that micro transactions lead to perverse incentive structures.

Perhaps an aggregated service over individual service would change the dynamic but I think many of the same incentives would remain.

We already have the Payment Request API, which is more than enough to handle this. My general view on the "process" mostly revolves around the UX from the customer's perspective. Someone needs to build a flow and say, this is how it works, take it or leave it.

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